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Review
The second game in Bitter Karella's Guttersnipe series:St. Hesper's Asylum for the Criminally Mischievous is unpolished, doesn't recognize nearly enough synonyms, requires using the verb USE (and does so inconsistently), responds with an unhelpful variation on "You can't do that" to almost every failed command and has a general rushed and unfinished feel about it.
It's also a hilarious text-adventure with one of my favourite protagonists of all time (Lil' Raggamuffin, respek 2 ya!) and some seriously good writing.
In structure, it's a puzzlechain where solving A gives you the purple penguin needed to solve B, which in turn gives you the TNT to solve C, which is how you get the oversized soup-ladle to solve... You get the point. None of it is too hard, although it is necessary to explore the surroundings with a keen eye for detail and converse with all of the, hmm, let's say slightly off-kilter inhabitants of the eponymous asylum.
The descriptions of the rooms and the characters in them convey a gloomy weird-but-not-quite-scary atmosphere that reminded me of the movie Corpse Bride.
The introduction and ending are also very well written, serving to shine a spotlight on the main character, and what a character it is!
Ragamuffin spits her boisterous and confident personality off the computer screen in everything she says. It's a joy for the player to see her rock her "ne'er-do-well and proud of it"-attitude all over the place.
Don't play it for the spit and polish. Play it for the splinters in your hands and the fact you'll be laughing them off.
Great fun!
